I was in love with the groove right from the start—overjoyed. I had sought music that was original and genre-expanding. With its combination of South American, classical, theatrical, and folky R&B sound, “Fantasy” was spot-on. I felt a pure, almost childlike excitement after our writing session that I hadn’t experienced in a while. I put my arm around Del Barrio, pulled him toward me, and shoved a cassette into his hand. “Eddie,” I said, “this is fantastic. Write out the changes, and we will cut a demo tomorrow—I don’t want to wait!”
The next afternoon Eddie came into Hollywood Sound looking resigned, like he had lost his best friend.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Maurice, I am honored that you want to record this song and all, but I’ve got to say this is a total piece of shit!”
“Eddie, this music works. It hits me right in my gut.”
“I played the cassette over and over again last night. I may not be from your world, but I know for sure this sucks.”
“I’m going to show you how wrong you are.”
Larry and Verdine, who were production assistants on All ’N All, put the final touches on “Fantasy.” Larry put a harpsichord intro down with George when I wasn’t there. At first I didn’t like it. Stupid me. The harpsichord set the whole classical backdrop of the tune and made all the other classical elements easier for the novice to swallow. But it would be Verdine and George experimenting in the studio that would bring added flavor to the intro. In the introduction, once the groove starts, there is this weird sound of Verdine doing these slides and distinctive plucks. George would use the frequency knob on his equalizer, going back and forth, creating this odd wah-wah effect. To me it sounded like a funky electrified cello.
The creative process of “Fantasy” took about two and a half months from the time we wrote the music. Verdine and I went back and forth over the lyrics. I knew what I wanted it to be about, but it didn’t come together for me until I saw an early screening of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was caught up in the symbolism and archetypal meanings. The aliens’ implantation of a vision into the Richard Dreyfuss character and the mythic elements of communicating with a deity stirred my imagination. The film’s acknowledgment of a primal spiritual yearning in all of us resonated deeply with me. What I liked most about Steven Spielberg’s creation, though, is that it honors the free will of the eternal life journey. I had been reading a lot about reincarnation and past lives, how we are born into the future through death. All those factors and more led to what the song ultimately became about.
Come to see victory in a land called fantasy,
Loving life for you and me, to behold, to your soul is ecstasy
You will find, other kind, that has been in search for you,
Many lives has brought you to
Recognize it’s your life, now in review
And as you stay for the play fantasy has in store for you,
A glowing light will see you through
It’s your day, shining day, all your dreams come true
As you glide in your stride with the wind, as you fly away
Give a smile from your lips and say
I am free, yes I’m free, now I’m on my way
—“Fantasy,” All ’N All, 1977
At the time, I didn’t know that a day would come when even I would grasp a more esoteric meaning to “Fantasy,” a meaning beyond the original intent of the lyric. In the early 2000s, Japanese filmmakers did an hour-long story about the song. The documentarian interviewed people, and in their own words they expressed what the song meant to them. Even though it’s sung in English, “Fantasy” has become a Japanese national anthem or secular hymn of sorts. Somehow the melodies and music have come to represent the achievement of dreams. They play it often at sporting events. Wow, they picked up the vibration.
My Christian brothers tell me that if you replace the word fantasy with heaven, you will understand what the song is about. “Fantasy” is about heaven to Christians; to Buddhists, it’s about nirvana; Muslims say it’s about paradise. I like the fact that people hear it through their own life experience; it’s a strong indication that we got it right. “Fantasy” is a continuation in a long line of EW&F songs that celebrate the equality and fellowship of humanity.
The heavily Brazilian-infused “Fantasy” would become one of our songs most played on radio. It represents how much we were in our own closed bubble. Disco was in full effect in 1977, and I paid absolutely no attention to it. One thing that I, the band, and anyone else who knows our music gets annoyed by is any idiot calling EW&F a “disco band.” Disco music was trite to me, pedestrian and boring. Most disco hits were at around 125 bpm (beats per minute), which—along with the straight kick drum pattern—made the music feel predictable.
Our music was eclectic, not the boring, sterile, unimaginative monotone of disco. We had the best rhythm section in the world. The tracks minus their vocals or horns are intricate unto themselves. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that “Serpentine Fire” and “Fantasy” got radio airplay at all at a time when songs like “YMCA” by the Village People, “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, and “Dancing Queen” by ABBA dominated the airwaves. “Serpentine Fire,” in particular, is profoundly odd, an idiosyncratic mixture of African music, tango, and gospel blues with an abstract lyric about kundalini energy. Its gospel calls of “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah” kinda make me feel southern and churchy. The underlying tone of the lyric comes off as a war of the flesh. It is our most ambitious single, because it is so musically abstract—the complete opposite of the disco that dominated the radio in 1977. It was almost as if, in our success, we were getting away with something. Our melodic blend of jazz, world, R&B, pop, and adult contemporary was leading a new sound. Some would later call the sound West Coast album-oriented rock, or modern soul.
As we were wrapping the recording of All ’N All, I started to consider what the album artwork would be. When we took the pictures for the All ’N All album poster, we had been burning the candles at both ends, and we all had bags under our eyes. Striving to stay out of the box, I put the word out that I was looking for something original that would visualize our musical and spiritual ideas. After meeting with a few artists, I settled on Shusei Nagaoka. We would start a professional association that would elevate us both.
Shusei didn’t speak a lick of English, and I damn sure didn’t speak any Japanese. When he arrived at my house, he bowed, I bowed, and I motioned him into the living room. I began to show him pictures out of some of my Egyptian coffee table books as well as books on UFOs, which have always intrigued me. He’d go mm-mm, and I’d point to pictures, nodding. He’d then pull out his large sketch tablet and pencils. Lifting up the cover, he’d start to draw. We both started to point to the picture books and then to his tablet. I signaled for him to stop. I then gathered bits of paper, some of them chewing gum wrappers, and drew little religious and other iconic symbols on them. I started placing them in a pattern on the paper, and he started drawing around them.
Somehow we communicated. And I was stunned by how it came out. I never said that I wanted the gatefold inside to be about the one God who transcends all paths, but in the end that’s exactly what manifested. I was fascinated at the detail, the color and expressiveness, of his work. It was delicious to my eyes. Shusei was an out-and-out genius.
Shusei gave me a deeper view of art in general. I started to understand how people think in images, which is why pictures are more universal than words. Shusei’s many EW&F album covers meant an enormous amount to our worldwide audience, especially the Japanese and Brazilians. They were interested in every detail of his art and its symbolism.
20
Musical Theater, Magical Tour
Time to get back on the road
Gonna leave these troubles behind
Time to carry the load
Oh, but my life is a true design
—“Back on the Road,” Faces, 1980
I’m not going to pretend that my desire to top our previous tour in terms of theater was not somewhat motivated by the fact that KISS and George Clinton had just raised the bar by producing some great rock-and-roll spectacles. I wanted our show to have added dimensions beyond just spectacle. I wanted our body movements to be eye-catching and our stage show dramatic in a way that had never been done by anyone in rock and roll. This would be the first time a black act would tour with a completely self-contained concert presentation of staging, sound, trucking, and all the rest.
The planning for the tour in support of All ’N All started immediately following the Spirit tour. I had the experience of seeing how technically involved this stuff could get, so I didn’t want to be caught off guard. I hired two people who would change the theatrical life of Earth, Wind & Fire forever—magician Doug Henning and choreographer George Faison.
George Faison, a choreographer without peer, had just come off his Tony Award–winning work in The Wiz. On the phone, I told him that from EW&F’s early days I had laid down a law that we would not be “a drill team,” with choreographed group moves like all those singing groups that had emerged in the early 1970s. The Temptations, the Dramatics, and the Spinners were all great, but that wasn’t Earth, Wind & Fire. I wanted something that was artistic but still fit us as musicians.
Faison immediately flew from New York to Los Angeles. He quietly watched our rehearsals and hung out in the studio. We worked on the All ’N All album by day and rehearsed for the tour at night. We had our first sit-down meeting late one night in the control room of Hollywood Sound.
“George, our music is difficult,” I said.
“Hold it, stop. Relax, Maurice. I’m not here to make you dance like Alvin Ailey or the Soul Train dancers!”
“Well, what do you see for us?”
“I’m going to create an internal rhythm for you guys.”
“Internal rhythm—what do you mean?”
“You’ll understand after about three weeks of rehearsal,” Faison said authoritatively.
In those first weeks of rehearsals, George watched carefully, took notes, and listened. Then all of a sudden he flipped on some nuclear switch, aggressively inserting himself into the rehearsals and taking over. George Faison was a commanding presence, with a big smile. He was a rare breed—demanding and tough as hell, yet cool and bright. It took me a while to get used to his working style, and the band was kind of dismissive of his instructions at first. But that quickly ended as his shouting got louder.
If I hadn’t understood what George meant by “internal rhythm” at first, after about two weeks of rehearsal, just as he’d predicted, I did. George would be on the spacious sound stage, circling us on a pair of roller skates. Round and round he’d go. All of a sudden he would holler out, “Stop! Everybody shut up!” He would pick up something in the music and create movements for us right there on the spot. Faison was a master. Every step and spin he assigned us made sense with what was going on musically in that moment. In time we all accepted that through his hollering Faison was giving us choreography tailored for us. Still, you had to remember more things. There were the practicalities of spinning around while holding cabled microphones, or not letting a guitar neck hit you in the face, or knowing that an explosion was going to happen as soon as you took your assigned three steps to the right. He was more than a choreographer: he was staging us as well. When Al McKay strummed his acoustic guitar on “I Write a Song for You,” Faison sat him down on the steps in front of Larry Dunn’s keyboard rig. These artistic touches were not insignificant. They were a continuation of my desire to let everybody shine onstage.
George had the choreography talent, as well as the psychological skill, to help us become one physically and mentally. He put the guitar players together in a threesome, in which Verdine, Al, and Johnny Graham would rush to the front of the stage and do their gyrations. Then he had a threesome of myself, Philip, and Ralph Johnson, where we would rush up to replace them and do our prescribed movements. Faison transformed our performances, giving more of the theatrical presence we had been working on from the very beginning.
I was sitting in the control room of Oceanway Studio on Sunset Boulevard one day when the door opened to a crack and through the small opening peered a little smiling guy with buck teeth and shaggy hair: Doug Henning. Come on in, I said happily. Doug Henning was the magicians’ magician, and now he was a Hollywood star too, due to his hit show on NBC-TV, Doug Henning’s World of Magic. Henning had single-handedly resurrected magic for the masses. He was by far the most popular magician in the world. I cleared the studio so we could have a chat.
“Doug, magic is something I have longed for many years to bring to Earth, Wind & Fire—it’s a big dream of mine.”
“Well, Maurice, I love you guys’ music, and I think I can help. But it requires a commitment from you to take my work extremely seriously.”
“Of course I will.”
“I hope you do, Maurice, because for the illusions to be executed properly requires an acting component, coupled with very precise timing. You and your band will have to be fully engaged mentally.”
Some people in Hollywood thought Doug, with his funny hippie look, was odd—a weirdo. I didn’t. I found him to be an interesting man, intense and highly spiritual. We talked a lot about meditation that first day. He took everything seriously: his work and his spiritual practice. An advocate of transcendental meditation, he made time to meditate for two hours, daily. After that initial meeting, I didn’t see him much, but Verdine and Frank Scheidbach met with him regularly. Verdine, forever the cheerleader, grabbed me from behind when I was leaving the studio one night and whispered in my ear, “Maurice, this Henning shit is going to blow your fucking mind!” Doug would come into our rehearsals, and the band would be joking around, and Doug would shout, “Okay, enough! Calm down! Focus! We’re doing this now.” He would take over. Just like George Faison, Doug was the best in the world at what he did, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass that we were the majestic Earth, Wind & Fire. His contribution to the All ’N All tour was life-changing. No one in rock had attempted anything like this. First, we had to be sworn to secrecy, spiritually and legally. I’ve never told Doug’s secrets to this day, even though he’s been gone for a while.
But our collaboration would not be without major complications. First, all the magic required us to build and transport our own stage. This meant more setup time and about four additional semi trucks. We already knew that renting trucks was pricey. Consequently, we bought all the semis outright and established a trucking company. We would rent the trucks out when we weren’t on the road. On top of all that, there was so much secrecy with the Henning camp that part of my contract with Doug was that I had to let his people build the sets. Frank Scheidbach, my production manager, was dead set against it.
“Maurice, we’ve never let anyone but McGraw and TFA build our sets,” Frank said.
“Yeah, but Henning’s people—the secrecy—it’s the deal I had to make.”
“I hope they understand this is arena rock, not some one-shot TV show production.”
When Doug’s contraptions arrived, Frank was not happy. In fact, he was pissed off. He said they’d used chintzy metal, shoddy cables, and inferior bearings. We had three-floor stages—a lot of elevators on the stage going up and down because there was always so much going on behind the scenes. Frank protested, but he got it up and working smoothly. A month into rehearsals with the new set, one of Doug’s elevators came crashing down, smashing into a thousand pieces. I was not there to witness this disaster. When Frank gave me the news, I got quiet. I was not one to raise my voice, but still, there was probably more determination in it. Frank didn’t say I told you so; he just laid out my options. We have to do it right, I told Frank. We stopped the show preparations for a few weeks and had Doug’s equipment all rebuilt by people Scheidbach had found. Big money. Later my lawyer sued Doug for the expense of this rebuilding.
Meanwhile, ac
ross town in West Los Angeles, George Massenburg was developing an innovative sound system for us. Using a new kind of bass reflex cabinet, it would be a benchmark for all other rock-and-roll acts. Several hundred thousand dollars later, the mammoth 35,000-watt hi-fi system was ready. Most acts had loud but shitty-sounding systems. Ours was loud but clear. It sounded spectacular. Finally things started to come together. Our custom-built stage had a triangular point protruding out from the center. It made me feel that the audience was all around me. Between the new lighting technology, the dancing, and the explosions, the stage was actually a dangerous place. A few steps in the wrong direction at the wrong time, and it could be curtains. You could drop down a hole or get fried by the gunpowder-based explosions. We all had to concentrate a lot more to make it seem effortless. This is when, to the best of my knowledge, the last of the Mohicans in the band gave up weed.
Doug created fantastic illusions. He devised an opening where we would arrive onstage from tubes hanging a hundred feet high above the stage. The tubes lowered to the stage, and we gradually became visible to the audience inside the cylinders. Then the tubes rose back to high above the stage, and we proceeded with the show. The tubes had to land within a quarter of an inch of accuracy every night. And since they were coming from a hundred feet in the air, our riggers had to have everything precise. It was our best show opening. Doug gave us another illusion in which hooded aliens with masks gradually joined us, and we then one by one entered a metallic pyramid, leaving the hooded aliens onstage. The pyramid would take off skyward and then explode. To the audience’s amazement, we would then reveal ourselves as the hooded aliens, as if we had been somehow transported from the exploding pyramid to the stage.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 23